People lined up for hours at the Supreme Court for oral arguments in the Shelby County, Ala., voting rights case.

WASHINGTON –The fate of a landmark civil rights law that has ensured the right to vote for millions of people in Texas and other states is now in the hands of a deeply divided Supreme Court.

An hour of heated oral arguments exposed the court’s ideological chasm, and a 5-4 ruling striking down key parts of the Voting Rights Act seemed plausible. The Shelby County, Ala., case amounts to the most potent assault to date on the law, in particular Section 5, which requires Texas and eight other states to seek federal permission before any changes to election rules.

Parts of seven other states also are covered.

The four liberals on the court were openly hostile to arguments that it’s time to end oversight in jurisdictions long covered by the Voting Rights Act. But the conservatives, and swing Justice Anthony Kennedy, seemed just as skeptical about the justification for treating states differently;

Kennedy repeatedly questioned the apparent use of “reverse engineering” by Congress to devise tests when it first enacted the law in 1965, and when it renewed the law in 2006, to ensure that states in the Deep South were covered while others with similar records were exempt from the most onerous provisions.

Kennedy asked repeatedly about the need for preclearance, rather than allowing the government or injured parties to sue a state over perceived discrimination.

U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, defending the law on behalf of the Obama administration, argued that after-the-fact lawsuits are too expensive and time consuming, and that the deterrent effect of Section 5 has been critical for decades.

If lawsuits are the only recourse, he said, “You’re never going to get at all these thousands of under the radar changes.”

On the liberal side, Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that Shelby County has lost more than 240 discrimination cases, making it a particularly bad champion for ending rules that protect minority voters.

“Why would we vote in favor of a county that is the epitome of what cause the passage of this law to begin with?” she demanded, interrupted Shelby County’s lawyer repeatedly.

Justice Stephen Breyer likened the evil of racial discrimination in elections to a plant disease. The cure has worked well enough that the blight – in this case, literacy tests – is not longer visible. But the underlying evil remains, evolving in subtle ways that demand ongoing treatment.

“This is a question of renewing a statute that in fact has worked,” he said.

Conservatives on the court were openly skeptical of the justification for singling out certain states for extra scrutiny.

Justice Samuel Alito suggested repeatedly that “maybe the whole country should be covered.”

Chief Justice John Roberts cited statistics showing that Mississippi has the best rate of black voter turnout, and Massachusetts the worst. He pressed the Obama administration’s chief appeals lawyer to say whether the government is contending that Southerners “are more racist than citizens in the North.”

No, Verrilli replied, arguing that the relevant question isn’t whether certain states have improved their records on voter discrimination after nearly 50 years of federal oversight. Rather, he said, the question the court should wrestle with is whether Congress made a reasonable judgment that ongoing oversight is justified in states with a history of problems — keeping in mind the speed and low cost of the preclearance mechanism compared to lawsuits filed after the fact.

“Congress was not voting on a clean slate” when it reauthorized the law in 2006, Verrilli said.

One of the more stunning moments came when Justice Antonin Scalia called the Voting Rights Act “the perpetuation of racial entitlement” – a comment that shocked some spectators and underscored the gap between minority advocates and those who view the case through a lens of federal infringement on states’ rights.

The political pressure on any senator, even those from the Deep South, would have been too high for them to vote against reauthorizing the law in 2006 or perhaps ever, Scalia argued, given the risk of being seen as taking away minority rights.

“This is not the kind of question you can leave to Congress,” Scalia said.

Afterward, on the courthouse steps, the Rev. Al Sharpton called the comment “the height of insult.”

In court, Verrilli responded to Scalia by urging the justices to defer to Congress as they usually try to do on political issues. “It would be extraordinary to … evaluate the judgment of Congress in light of that sort of motive analysis,” he said.

A ruling is expected when the court’s term ends in June.

State Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio, chairman of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus in the Texas House, attended the arguments. Like other minority advocates, he warned of dire consequences without Section 5. The state’s controversial voter ID law would have been put into effect last year, for instance, “leaving 795,000 registered voters in Texas without an acceptable ID.”

He called the argument that the law treats some states more harshly a “red herring.” Gesturing to the U.S. Capitol, he noted that Congress routinely sends more funding to one state than to another for highways or other projects. “Nobody around here thinks states get the same treatment” in all matters, he said.

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